Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)

Re:Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020) by corrral on Friday May 27, 2022 @11:40AM (#31530871)

This seems like a great place to ask how the ever-loving shit you get a front-end project with simple NPM-fetched libraries to bundle into either a single .js file ready to go in a <script> tag, or a block of <script> tags with all the referenced .js files in a directory and ready to serve. Ideally with typescript support, but surely (ha. ha. ha. ha.) I can just tack that on top and point whatever-this-is at typescript's output directory and my package.json, so that shouldn't be a problem (yeah, right...).

I've written JS professionally for probably 12 or 13 out of the last 22 years, but I skipped the first couple iterations of frontend bundlers and tooling (kept rocking it old-school and just including plain .js files with script tags) until React, so I seem to have missed that intermediate phase, and now I cannot find it. I've lost probably 3 to 4 hours to trying to figure this out, last couple times I looked.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020) by SahAssar on Friday May 27, 2022 @12:14PM (#31531305)

For me esbuild has worked pretty well. Given a index.js as the entrypoint for your app:

  npx esbuild index.js --bundle --sourcemap --minify --outfile=out.js --format=esm

esbuild is also pretty quick and does not have a lot of npm depencencies thanks to being a go binary.

npx should download and run the binary for you and npx is almost always installed with node automatically.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020) by corrral on Friday May 27, 2022 @12:55PM (#31531844)

Thank you. It was really hard to figure out which tools even could do this so I knew which one I ought to deeply "RTFM" for, which was really frustrating to me because it seemed like the most obvious default behavior for any JS build/bundle tool, which should be what it did if you just typed "some-build-tool build" or "bundle" or whatever, from your project root with nothing but a package.json containing a "main" entry.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020) by SahAssar on Friday May 27, 2022 @01:47PM (#31532501)

I agree that this is really not a good experience. I prefer js projects that don't rely on build tools at all for this reason, but most devs, frameworks and libraries don't support such a use-case.

When I have to use build-tools I usually go for esbuild.

[ Parent | on HN ]